It's been quite some time since we last reviewed a graphics card
here at Technoyard. Since the time the first Geforce 3 graphics card
arrived into the market, this industry has experienced phenomenal
growth in terms of sales revenue and technological advancements. I
remember how eagerly we were anticipating the arrival of the Geforce
3 into the market last year, and boy what a lot has changed since
then. Now not more than year after the introduction of the GF3 nVidia
has plans for the Geforce 4 as well. We can expect to see these boards
pretty soon on the shelves.
What we'll be looking at today is one of the titanium series graphics
cards from Hercules; the 3D Prophet II. Founded in 1982 Hercules is
now under the Guillemot Corporation. Even though they have faced many
up's and down's over the past, Hercules has remained in the lime light
right throughout. It was only very recently Hercules released their
line-up of the Geforce Titanium GPU, and we would like to thank Hercules
for giving us the opportunity to look at their 3D Prophet II card
based on the Geforce 2 Titanium GPU.
Lets take a look at the specifications of the card before we go any
further
Specifications
Graphics
processor
Memory
64MB on-board
DDR RAM memory
Bus
AGP 2X/4X
Memory interface
128-bit DDR
Memory type
250MHz DDR
RAM qualified
Core clock
speed
250MHz
Internal
chipset bandwidth
8GB/s
Brute rendering
architecture
4 pixels
pipelines
2 texels
for each pipeline
2,000Mtexels/s
3D acceleration
features enhancements
Hardware
T&L
Special effects
Cube
environmental mapping
Bump
mapping
Hardware
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA)
Vertex
blending
Texture
compression
Lighting,
Shading…
RAMDAC/Pixel
cycle
350MHz
Output options
High-resolution
TV encoder (up to 800x600)
VGA Output
Supported
API(s)
DirectX®
& OpenGL®
Bundled Software
Hercules
Quake3 level (H3ShoDne map)
PowerDVD™
3.0
3Deep®
NVIDIA
Demos
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Intel Pentium® II / AMD K6® and higher or compatible
versions
Available AGP 2.0 compliant slot
64MB RAM
10MB hard disk space (or larger for installing games)
CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
Microsoft Windows®XP, Me, 98, 95 OSR2, 2000 or NT4 or later
